"Jamaica has to continue being Jamaica," Goldman adds. On the other hand, dancehall is a rebel without a cause. One could hear the rebellion in reggae, its righteous fury, raging against injustice and oppression. Shaggy, Sean Kingston and other recent acts may have had some hits but their performances are more akin to reggae's descendant, dancehall, which has the same audacity and certainly the entertainment value but not the depth, politics and artful message of reggae. She notes that while there are wonderful individual voices like Etana and Tarrus Riley coming out of Jamaica, there is no big front-running artiste spearheading the identity of Jamaican music in much the same way as Bob Marley did.
The impact of reggae on the world is more forceful than reggae itself," she adds. "Reggae has lost that identity and richness it had when it was a spiritual and political force," opines Vivien Goldman, a long-time music journalist who has written extensively on world music and recently taught a popular course on Bob Marley and Jamaican music at New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, where she is an adjunct professor. Sign up for The Gleaner’s morning and evening newsletters.īut almost five decades later, really, has reggae lost its soul? The times, after all, are a changing.
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